1. Big Star - Way Out West - those first two big star records are just so beautiful...2. Sigur Rus - Samskyti3. The Decembrists - Red Right Ankle4. Led Zeppelin - Black Dog - hey! there's a fine Halloween song... ghosts and devils and drums, oh my!5. Fire Theft - Summertime6. Hoodoo Gurus - Bittersweet - oh, my yes.... I couldn't be that strong, that used to be my favorite song... sometimes bands, more or less decent, get everything exactly right and produce a song that vaults into the stratosphere... that's just perfect. This is one.... I hold you like a sword and you won't cut me, cut me like you did before.... 7. Flaming Lips - Suddenly Everything Has Changed8. Billy Bragg & Wilco - I guess I planted 9. OOIOO - Ah Yeah! - nifty piece of Japanese avant-pop, I guess you'd call it... 10. Jonathan Richman - The Origin of Love (reprise) - from Wig in a Box, a Hedwig and the Angry Inch cover album... nice...

Video? Maybe I should do something Halloweeny, but I dunno, why bother? Let's take something simpler - Dave Faulkner looks like he's got indigestion in this oh so 80s video - but shit, if this ain't a great song:

Though then again - courtesy of a neat essay at Bright Lights After Dark - here's the Headless Horseman song, from Disney's Legend of Sleepy Hollow...

Monday, October 26, 2009

It's hard to know exactly what to say about Lars von Trier - people seem to have been writing him off lately. I've been writing him off lately - his 00's films have been generally disappointing - he seems to have been wandering in a wilderness this decade, making films that sound terrible clever, and play like pure cleverness. Antichrist has all the makings of a "provocation" - and delivers, as provocation, I admit it. But also, delivers - something - as a film. It looks fantastic - as all his films do - and it has a decided power.... It has the power to make you want to argue about it, try to come to grips with it - make me argue about it anyway. So here goes...

In some ways, it's a programmatic horror film, though one with the subtexts laid out on the surface. Fear of sex - of birth, of children - death - time, nature - fear of women, of men, the cruelty of men (and women), the ravages of implacable nature, etc. The horror film elements are themselves almost all surface - the cabin in the woods, where the educated folks from the city are assaulted by monsters - the explicit externalization of a theme of the conscious, rational world (self, civilization) under attack by fears, anxieties, the id, all given concrete form. Here, the monster is nature itself - which launches an immediate attack on the characters and never relents. Acorns dropping on the roof like bombs, rain, the grass swallowing them up, animals, dying and rotting, threatening, invading... Of course, the monsters outside soon prove to be inside. The inside/outside dichotomy (which is played out in both the plot itself, in the cabin and out of it, and symbolically) is broken - barriers are permeable - the Other becomes a Double, turns into us. (No one has to sell their soul - it’s already in them, most assuredly.) Of course that - the breaking of barriers between what we are and what we fear, the invasion of our selves, our bodies, minds, everything, by outside forces - and the discovery that what we fear outside is, in fact, already in us - that is another of the horror movie's great themes.... You can add to this great dollops of Tarkovsky’s nature - the elements, water, air, fire, earth - plants and animals, the sky, you name it.... I don’t find the dedication unjustified - the film's absolute reliance on natural imagery, combined with its dedication to the use of nature as a sign of inner states of mind - seems right.

But what really makes the film fascinating is something else. The story itself is, after all, silly - way too obvious, too overdetermined... But it’s Lars von Trier - and he is always thinking about more than the story - not just the inside, but the outside, the form, the way it’s told - and the mechanics of telling - and he makes these things integral to the thematics of the piece. Take the shots of the actors looking directly at the camera - and how often these are linked to reverse shots of those totemic animals. We, the audience - and LVT and crew, the camera, the filmmakers - are in the story - we are like the animals: silent observers, who seem passive but end up driving the story. The characters look out of the screen at us - we are cut back in to the shots, as the animals - who, like us and like Von Trier, are outside the story, outside the world - but somehow drive it.

So - the story is nonsense - though I think that’s quite intentional too. The obviousness of the story, as well as its incoherence, the self-conscious appropriation of every standard horror movie trope, is integral to how it works. None of the story (“real” or even symbolic) really grabs you - but that’s not what von Trier is after. Horror films proper do depend on identification - you are pulled in, to sympathize with someone - though they then manipulate it, the best ones. Indeed, the fluidity of sympathy in horror films is usually central to the best horror films - that permeability of inside and outside, Others and Doubles, that makes the best ones great. Here, that stuff is laid out with the emotional investment of a blog post - the film is completely critical, identification is beside the point.

What it does, though, is invest rather intense energy in its form, as form. What grabs you isn’t the characters or their situations, or even exactly their symbolic significance, their pain, the themes - what grabs you are the images, what you see - the specific details of the actors, their bodies, faces, their voices, the way they move... what you hear... and maybe most of all, how all this is seen, how the film sees it, shows it. The camera work, the angles, the effects - the editing, which as always in von Trier's films is strange, surprising, utterly intriguing.... It’s in the moving camera, say, how von Trier makes sense of it. The wobbly, hand-held style, the look, clearly means to show us a wobbly, indistinct, unstable world - and not exactly in a “metaphorical” way - it gives you the impression that this is what the world looks like. It’s heightened by the effects used - the distorted images, the color manipulation and so on. It creates a world, the world of this film, that is unstable, distorted, unformed, chaotic. It is like a subjective POV (and you can call it that), but it’s separated from the characters - it is invested in the camera, not the characters. It's Von Trier's world - or our world - not the character's world: they are part of the world, they move in it - but they don't generate it, the way characters seem to generate the world in most subjective films...

Another thing I like about Von Trier's use of the moving camera is how he makes you feel the presence of the camera itself - of the camera operator as a person, carrying this thing, moving with it, pointing it at things, taking up space. It makes the physical presence of the camera, the camera crew, etc. part of the content of the film. This is true in almost all his films - even when the camera is put in odd, impersonal places (as in Boss of It All). It is hard to forget about the physical presence of the machines, and the people who operate them, or put them there...

In the end - that interest in the act of telling stories, even in their mechanics, is one of the things that makes von Trier such a compelling figure. He still is, really - not just for the shock value, either. His films are, I suppose, more like critical essays about themselves, than real films - I don't know if that's really a good thing. At his best - Breaking the Waves, the Kingdom - he makes the surface, the story, characters and so on, as interesting and engaging as the critical ideas behind the films (and those films are also very critical.) But everything he does explores the process of making films, telling stories, making sense of the world.... Antichrist, I think, might be his best film in a decade...

Saturday, October 24, 2009

Since I continue to fail to provide any new content here, it's time to drag out some tried and true filler. Though if I ever do get some more content up here, it might well be music related - a bunch of interesting records coming out recently... I've been way down on my CD buying, but - things like new Pere Ubu and Flaming Lips and Yo La Tengo and David Sylvain have changed that... maybe to the point of a post or two....

But now? A place holding random 10 and video, of course.

1. Pixies - I Bleed2. Ryan Adams - Gonna Make You Love Me - catchy as hell this song...3. Audioslave - Be Yourself - from their second record, which doesn't have much going for it except that Tom Morrello lets his inner shredder out once in a while...4. Black Sabbath - Bit of FInger/Sleeping Village/Warning - the sabs don't need much introduction or defense...5. Big Star - Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' on 6. Rolling Stones - Silver Train7. Tom Waits - Gun Street Girl - bunch of stuff coming up that hasn't come up in a heck of a long time on this machine. Very nice...8. Patti Smith - Break it Up9. Richard and Linda Thompson - Hokey Pokey - feels so good when you put it in your mouth, sends a shiver on down your spine... 10. Joy Division - I Remember Nothing - cheerful way to end...

And video, of course - let's go a double shot of Pixies, live in studio, BBC, 1989:

And - in honor of the new release by America's greatest rock band: a couple Pere Ubu videos animated by the Brothers Quay:

Friday, October 16, 2009

Well? With the Sox out, I'm not so energetic about updating about the baseball playoffs... BUt might as well throw something out here. What? Predictions? I went 50/50 in the first round, I wouldn't mind doing that again, as long as I get the right one wrong... But - I see no reason to pick against the Yankees, who look like they have the real deal again. You have to hand it to them - I do anyway - Texeira and Sabathia are the real deal - no surprise really... I still suspect Burnett will be a burden over the long haul, but it's not unreasonable to get a championship out of him... I hope not though - but I think they are pretty strong favorites, over the Angels (who are certain capable of winning, just not too likely), and then the NL.

And the Phillies have already managed to blow a game, along with winning one - but I think they will find their way to the series again. Where I doubt they'll beat the Yankees, but I I sure hope so.

My rooting interests, such as they are, should be fairly apparent - I like the Phils... I also like the Angels, more than I sometimes let on (since they always seem to play the Red Sox in the first round) - I like a bunch of their players; I've been wearing an Angels hat to my softball games for years (it's reached Manny Ramirez levels of grime these days)... I'd love to see a Phils/Angels series... Yankees Dodgers would do something horrible, force me into an unbearable situation - I might have to root for.... evil incarnate... cause the dodgers annoy me.

Saturday, October 10, 2009

I'm still posting at a gruesomely slow pace - at least I have reasons: a class - I got some posts out of the class I took in the spring, hopefully we'll get some material from this one. Like this post! Which - if I'd had a bit more time this week, I might have posted as part of the double billathon - of course I could have posted the paper I was writing for the double billathon too...) Still.... the Nazi Cinema Class has had me watching, well - Nazi cinema - Leni Riefenstahl, in the early going. And this week, the HFA showed Sergei Eisenstein's October - offering a nice chance to do some comparing. The class has made quite a bit of "fascist aesthetics" - what it is, whether it's a valid and useful term... I suppose thinking about that guided what I noticed watching the Eisenstein this time around.

I don't know how much you can generalize from Eisenstein and Riefenstahl about Nazi and Soviet propaganda and cinema - they're both exceptional, both relatively unique... But I think there are some patterns there - things he does that she didn't that other Russians did and other German's didn't.... I suppose I can say something about them. Let's see:

1) Faces - after watching a Nazi films, especially Riefenstahl's, Russian films are quite a shock. Everyone in Triumph of the Will is beautiful (except the party leaders - a distinctly unimpressive bunch...), young and healthy - October is full of all kinds of faces. Young, old, handsome, not handsome - scraggly beards, snaggly (missing) teeth, lined skin, awkward, plainspun clothes, all kinds of ethnicities.... but they're all shot with the same heroic lighting, framing, all treated as though they were beautiful - the film celebrates their diversity, their individuality, though also their ability to be representative, of Russia, or Siberia, or Woman, or whatever they are... I think this is logic to it: the Russians act as though the cause confers beauty - being on the right side makes you beautiful; the Germans - Riefenstahl in particular, but this seems pretty common in Nazi propaganda and art - act as though beauty proves the rightness of the cause. All those faces in October are made beautiful or ugly depending on their righteousness - the bourgeoisie, the government, the cadets and women in the Winter Palace, the Mensheviks, are shot to look distinctly unattractive - but overall, they don't really look much different from the Bolsheviks and workers. They're just shot differently- and the ones who switch sides, immediately start getting better lighting... Triumph of the Will doesn't do anything like that - everyone is beautiful, everyone gets a cool uniform.... not because they're right and the enemy is wrong - rather, beauty is a guarantee of the rightness of the cause - if they weren't beautiful, they wouldn't be Nazis. (Though the bets are off when it comes to Himmler of Hess's unibrow...)

2) Jokes - there is no comedy in Triumph of the Will. There are some smiles and laughing - there are German men playing rough games, but there are no jokes. October on the other hand is, basically, a comedy - it's more like one of those comic book histories of the world than serious history or propaganda. It is packed from end to end with jokes - mostly visual puns (Kerensky and the peacock, the empty coats of the provisional government), but plenty else, including some neat verbal/visual jokes, like Kerensky's introduction - the repeated shots of him and a pair of cronies going up the same set of stairs, with the intertitles listing his many government offices... Of course, since the actual October revolution was fairly bloodless, it makes sense to shoot it as a comedy. The government was done for - the soviets took over without much effort - Kerensky (at least according to Eisenstein) bravely ran away. (And Eisenstein treats it in just about those terms - though most of the Eisenstein quotes in The Holy Grail are from Alexander Nevsky.) And it is, in fact, funny....

3) Voices - Triumph of the Will is a completely controlled production - nothing we see, nothing we hear comes from anyone but an authorized source. The only voices we hear are Nazis, speaking as Nazis - we don't even hear Nazis "off duty" as it were - everything is official, everything has a controlled source.... October is just as controlled (though Eisenstein's control is certainly at least a counterweight to that of the communists proper) - but it has a very different approach to words. Everyone speaks - there are words everywhere - the narration in the titles, dialogue (some in the titles, quite a bit just shown - but you barely get that (seeing, not hearing, people talking) in Riefsenstahl's film) - banners - pamphlets.... People act, as crowds, as individuals making up crowds - there's a much stronger sense of the individuality of all those people - coming together to form whatever they form... And this is quite obvious in the proliferation of words (actual or implied) in October...

4) Style - those relationships between the mass and the individual in Nazi and Soviet propaganda films remain pretty consistent. Riefsenstahl, particularly, is completely controlled - the mass is a mass, individuality is stripped away - indiivduals become blocks in the mass.... But in Eisenstein's film - for all the mass movements, the types, the choreography, the heroic angles - there remains a significant amount of chaos. Chaos, individuality, are harnessed by the communists - in theory at least. (Obviously, this is all how they are presenting themselves - what the commies were really up to is another matter.) But it's still striking - the choreography of Eisenstein's crowds is far more chaotic, kinetic - they don't form patterns and masses, they flow - they have the turbulance, unpredictability, and sheer power of rivers and oceans - they never form into the blocks you see in Triumph of the Will. Again - the end results may have been terror and control, state violence and repression, in both Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia - but the two movements present themselves, their ideal image of themselves, very differently. The Germans are all arranged in blocks - mass ornaments (in Siegfried Kracauer's term) - individuals function as blocks in these masses. Their films are full of lines, lines of people - static blocks, that retain their shapes as they move - parades, lines of men, salutes en mass, all in unison, all together.... The Russians though - Eisenstein, at least - also deal in masses, but masses that are not blocks, but - to pick up the metaphor above - flows. They move - they don't form rigid lines, or they lose them quickly when they do - when crowds act as masses, they do so in turbulent pulses. A crowd voting in October, everyone holding up a kind of ballot - does not do so in uniform, but rather, a roomful of men waving their cards in the air and shouting. Everyone moves on their own, to create a massive pulse of energy.

Now, obviously, some of this does come down to the filmmaker - Eisenstein is a shockingly kinetic filmmaker. Even now - October is an overwhelming onslaught - as fast a film as I have ever seen. (Though Eisenstein also modulates - he builds tension, uses longer shots, still shots, quieter shots - that explode when the action comes...) Riefenstahl - though a dynamic editor, with a superb eye for imagery, has none of his protean powers, none of his energy. She is too in love with the compositions, the patterns, the aesthetics - Eisenstein is more in love with the movements, flow, energy, making images clash and bang off one another - Riefsenstahl prefers editing that builds to a grander pattern - editing that reinforces its underlying imagery. She hammers away at her ideas sometimes - she seems to be aiming at a kind of monumentalism, awe... I find it, I'm afraid, much less appealing than what Eisenstein does - it seems simple minded and pretentious, very quickly. Eisenstein might have his pretentious moments, but they're gone in a flash, the second or two it takes him to cut to something else.... There have been comments from people in this class about how good Riefenstahl is, how important - I can almost see it in Olympia, but not Triumph of the Will. Its wickedness aside, it's a chore to watch. Good or evil, Eisenstein's films are all revelatory, and thrilling, every time I see them.

Monday, October 05, 2009

Another year, another playoff - though delayed, because of some other sport being played tonight in the worlds worst stadium.... Anyway - try to keep it brief, but when I start gassing about baseball, it's hard to stop.

Angels vs Red Sox - Sox own the Angels; but the Angels, as usual, have a strong, experienced team. One of these years they will win - though I'm not guessing this year. Also as usual, the Sox have the best pitchers in the series - have a deeper, better bullpen - both teams have deep, balanced lineups who can score a ton - but probably no one guy who can carry them. So go with Lester and Beckett, who if healthy, are money.

Yankees vs. Tigers or Twins - if Tigers - it's Verlander x2 or nothing. If Twins - hard to see them winning. But they have a deep set of pitchers, they have Joe Mauer and a bunch of useful role players. The Tigers even have some decent pitchers behind Verlander - and Miguel Cabrera - maybe. Not even Manny Ramirez ever pulled that shit, especially not around playoff time. It's awful hard to see either of those teams knocking off the Yankees, though not impossible - behind Sabathia (who hasn't been ridden into the ground this year), there's room for failure in the rotation - a couple pitchers get hot against them, and you get a big upset. But - as long shots go it's really freakin' long...

If Boston and NY square off in round two - we should be in for something. If the Angels win - I think the Yanks are back on top. Though either the Sox or Angels can give them a pretty good fight, if they are on their games.

Dodgers vs. Cards - both teams are dragging into the playoffs, but there they are. I'm guessing it's the Cards' series to lose - they have better pitchers (Carpenter is as good as it gets, really - when he's healthy, which is about once a decade.) Pujols is what Manny Ramirez used to dream about being.

Phillies vs. Rockies - I think the Phillies will pull themselves together like the red sox and Yankees generally do this time of year - they are a good team that has been a bit weird at times, but are as likely as not to bring it all together at once. Though the Rockies are no slouches - they have a pitching staff, including the best closer in the NL playoffs, right? But Hamels is another money pitcher - and all those hitters....

I will guess now that the Phillies get back to the series - though if the Cards are firing on all cylinders, they are a real threat. I have to think about this - and any of the four seem capable of getting there. The Phil's main advantage over the Cards is Tony LaRussa. Ditto the Rocks. But the Cards have the best pitcher and best hitter in the league - that works sometimes.

And the World Series? Here is a question - what was the last time the World Series was the best series of the post-season? we've had some series' that might have been closer than they looked - last year, maybe 06, 05 even (all those 1 run games...) - but the last loser to win 2 games was the Yanks, in 03... a string which included a few very lopsided contests (Sox-Rockies in 07 achieved almost NBA levels of inevitability), but also a huge upset (2006), and a couple series that looked a lot closer coming in (last year; the 2004 Cards team - though they lost Carpenter, which turned them from world beaters into the Angels.) League champinionships have been much better - Sox/Rays last year, Sox/Indians the year before, Cards/Mets in 06, Sox/Yanks in 04 - as good a series as you're likely to see, both championships in 03 (Bartman! Aaron Boone!) - etc. It's an odd phenomenon. Likely to change one of these years - I think the Phillies or Cards could make any of the AL teams work, if they had to. Though I'd still say, Yankees and Sox are the teams to beat. Sabathia! Lester and Beckett! Rivera and Papelbon! that's where the Phils and Cards run into trouble - they don't have that guy at the end.... or the string of guys between the starts and the closer - Hughes and Coke and company, Wagner and Ramirez and Okie and Bard - those two teams are going to be hard to beat.

Elsewhere - the Tigers and Twins finish the AL Central pub crawl with a sleep off, or something; then the playoffs start! I will probably manage to write something about that.

And - not that I want to say much more about Roman Polanski (I wrote up another screed a couple days ago, actually, but it was too depressing to post), but 2 articles came through RSS this morning that neatly bracket the subject - Jason Bellamy rather neatly sums up most of my opinion on the case.... while Erich Kuersten, at Bright Lights After Dark gets at some of the reason why the anti-Polanski commentary sometimes seems determined to be more obnoxious than his defenders. Sliding oh so easily from support for his arrest and extradition to attacks on the people who don't agree with you. Dumb as that infamous petition for his release is, calling his defenders "rape apologists" isn't all that different from calling his crime a "morals charge" - both are cheating, twisting words to strip out the mixture of motives and values involved, to hide the truth about what people do and say.